Assessing the Overlap Between Three Measures of Food Reward

Abstract

Food reward is an important concept for research in eating behaviors. Many food reward tasks have been developed and are in active use. However, little is known how much these tasks overlap. Here, we sought to compare three promising food reward tasks: (1) the Leeds Food Preference Questionnaire (LFPQ; a procedure combining explicit ratings of wanting and liking and an implicit wanting task based on forced choice), (2) a hand grip force task, and (3) an emotional attentional blink (EAB) task. Specifically, we assessed whether the tasks are sensitive to changes in hunger, correlate with each other, and correlate with trait binge eating and snack food calorie intake. Thirty-nine women aged 25.51 ± 5.99 years, with a BMI of 22.51 ± 3.58 kg/m 2 completed the three tasks twice: after a 6-h fast and following a breakfast meal. In the fasted condition, participants were also given ad libitum access to snack foods to assess calorie intake. Prior to the two laboratory sessions, participants completed a trait binge eating questionnaire. Results revealed that the LFPQ’s explicit wanting and explicit liking subscales, as well as grip force reflected higher food reward scores in the fasted condition. The three metrics also correlated positively with each other. Explicit wanting and liking correlated with snack food intake, while grip force did not. None of the tasks were related to trait binge eating. Reaction times in the forced choice procedure did not reflect changes in hunger, but the task was nevertheless able to differentiate between foods varying in taste and fat content. The EAB was not sensitive to the hunger manipulation; neither did the task correlate with binge eating or energy intake. Collectively, our findings suggest that the explicit wanting and liking scales and the grip force task measure the same construct, whereas EAB results may be obscured by a variety of potential confounding factors. Future research could include additional food reward tasks in comparisons, measure covariates that may moderate the variables’ associations, and compare hunger-dependent changes in food reward in different subgroups.

No evidence of flavour-nutrient learning in a two-week ‘home exposure’ study in humans

“…The handgrip task, which we believed would track changes in reward value of the beverage over the exposure period, also showed no significant group differences based on calories or viscosity. Interestingly, in agreement with (Arumäe et al, (2019), we found that the behavioural measure of wanting (i.e., the hand grip task) was positively associated with self-report measures of wanting (rs = .3-.5). We also observed group differences in liking for the beveragethose with high viscosity were less liked than those with low viscosity, though liking was not altered by exposure to calories.…”

“…In this way, handgrip force is argued to be a measure of beverage reward value (Ziauddeen et al, 2014). The hand grip force task taps into the same construct as liking and wanting (Arumäe et al, 2019), but has not been applied previously in the context of dietary learning.…”

Measuring food preference and reward: Application and cross-cultural adaptation of the Leeds Food Preference Questionnaire in human experimental research

“…Adaptations of the LFPQ have included dimensions of protein (Griffioen-Roose et al, 2011;Karl et al, 2018), fruits/vegetables and snacks (G. Finlayson, N. King, & J. Blundell, 2007b), and alcoholic/soft drinks in high or low calorie form (unpublished data). The LFPQ has also been used in different appetite-related contexts such as high altitude (Aeberli et al, 2013), elderly care homes (Van der Meij, Wijnhoven, Finlayson, Oosten, & Visser, 2015), eating disorder clinics (Cowdrey, Finlayson, & Park, 2013;Dalton & Finlayson, 2014), sleep laboratories (McNeil et al, 2017), bariatric surgery wards (Redpath et al, 2018), or anti-obesity/diabetes drug trials (Blundell et al, 2017) and is now translated linguistically into 16 languages including Tamil (Ranasinghe et al, 2018), Arabic (Alkahtni, Dalton, Abuzaid, Obeid, & Finlayson, 2016), Mandarin Chinese (Zhou et al, 2019), Estonian (Arumäe, Kreegipuu, & Vainik, 2019) and Norwegian (Martins et al, 2017). The widespread use and adaptation of the LFPQ creates a need to provide a uniform procedure and best practice recommendations to develop and implement reliable cultural adaptations, improve data quality and facilitate comparison with other studies.…”

Post-Ingestive Sensations Driving Post-Ingestive Food Pleasure: A Cross-Cultural Consumer Study Comparing Denmark and China

“…The most common Food Reward measures are self-reported liking [16,17], self-reported desire-to-eat [13] or wanting for a specific food [13,16]. Many Food Reward measures and tasks have been developed and are in active use [18]. Rogers and Hardman (2015) define Food Reward as the "momentary value of a food to the individual at the time of ingestion", measured directly with a rating of "desire to eat the entire portion right now" [19].…”

“…The LFPQ has been applied and/or adapted by several researchers [16,20,[22][23][24]. Additional Food Reward measures include grip force operant tasks [18,20,25], willingness to pay [20,26], and Emotional attentional blink [18,27]. An operant task could include tapping a space bar for 60 seconds, being told, the more you tap, the more of a given food you will receive [19,20], or by squeezing a handheld dynamometer as a response to specific food images [25].…”